To:INESSA ARMAND

Written:Written earlier than June 5, 1914Published:Sent from Poronin to Lovran (Austria-Hungary, now Yugoslavia).

      Printed from the original.

      Published for the first time in the Fourth (Russian) Edition of theCollected Works.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[1976],

      Moscow,Volume 35,

      pages144-145.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Ihave just read, my dear
			       friend,[1]Vinnichenko’s new novel which you sent
me.[3]There’s balderdash and stupidity! To combine together as much as
possible of every kind of “horror”, to collect in one story “vice” and
“syphilis” and romantic crime, with extortion of money by means of
blackmail (with the sister of the blackmailed person turned into a
mistress), and the trial of the doctor! All this with hysterical outbursts,
eccentricities, claims of having one’s “own” theory of organising
prostitutes. This organisation represents nothing bad in itself; but it is
theauthor, Vinnichenko himself, who makes nonsense of it,smacks his lipsover it, makes it his “hobby horse”.

Thereview inRechsays that it is an imitation of Dostoyevsky
and that there are good parts in it. There is an imitation, in my opinion,
and a supremely bad imitation of the supremely bad in Dostoyevsky. Of
course, in real life there are individual cases of all the “horrors”
which Vinnichenko describes. But to lump them all together, and insucha way, means laying on the horrorswith a trowel,
frightening both one’s own imagination and the reader’s, “stunning” both
oneself and the reader.

OnceI had to spend a night with a sick comrade (delirium tremens), and
once I had to “talk round” a comrade who had attempted suicide (after the
attempt), and who some years later did commit suicide. Both recollectionsà laVinnichenko. But in both cases these were small
fragmentsof the lives of both comrades. But this pretentious, crass idiot
Vinnichenko, in self-admiration, has from such things compiled a collection
that is nothing but horrors—a kind of “twopenny
dreadful”. Brrr.... Muck, nonsense, pity I spent so much time reading it.

P.S.How are things going with your arrangements for the summer?

Yours,V. I.

Franchement,continuez vous à vous fâcher ou
			      non?[2]

[1]Thewords “my dear friend” were written by Lenin in
English.—Ed.

[2]Tellme frankly, are you still angry, or not?—Ed.

[3]Leninrefers to the novelPaternal Testamentsby the Ukrainian
writer V. Vinnichenko, a bourgeois nationalist.